Row over German attempts to weaken car pollution limits

A plan put forward by Thomas Ulmer, a German centre-right MEP, to modify the European Commission’s proposal to limit emissions from new cars could make the legislation up to 15% less effective, a Commission official warned the European Parliament’s environment committee on Tuesday (19 February).

European law requires carmakers to comply with a limit on their average emissions of 130g of carbon dioxide by 2015, but they have already met this target years ahead of schedule. The Commission proposed last year to require carmakers to ensure that the average emissions of their fleet are no more than 95g CO2/km by 2020.

Ulmer’s proposal calls for a significant expansion of the use of ‘super credits’, which would allow carmakers to count clean vehicles at a premium when calculating their fleet average. The Commission has calculated that the super credits proposed by Ulmer would lead to an effective 2020 cap of up to 109g CO2/km, Philip Owen, a head of unit in the department for climate change, told the committee.

Under the Commission’s proposal, any vehicle that emits less than 35g CO2/km would count as 1.3 cars. Under Ulmer’s proposal, any vehicle emitting less than 50g CO2/km would count as 2.5 cars until 2017 and as 2 cars from 2017 to 2020. Manufacturers would also be able to continue using the super credits that they have accumulated after 2020, something not allowed under the Commission’s proposal.

These super credits would be particularly beneficial to German carmakers which tend to make larger, heavier vehicles, and so have higher fleet average emissions.

An internal document from the European Commission, seen by European Voice, says that an expansion of super credits is also being proposed by Germany in the Council of Ministers, where it is asking for clean vehicles to count as 3.5 cars in 2016, with this number being reduced to 1.5 in 2020.

The Commission warns that the German and Ulmer proposals, “would have implications for the ability to set further CO2 targets and for the possible stringency of those targets”.

Fiona Hall, a British Liberal MEP who is guiding the proposed legislation through the Parliament’s industry committee, wants the super-credits scheme to be scrapped and replaced with a ‘flexible low carbon vehicle mandate’ that would penalise carmakers if less than 2% of their fleets are low-carbon vehicles.

Consumers group BEUC has also criticised Ulmer’s proposal. “Super credits allow carmakers to reduce and whitewash the average emission level of their fleet without cutting emissions for the entire range of their models,” said Monique Goyens, the director-general of BEUC. The full Parliament will vote on the proposal in July.

MEPs on the environment committee also discussed the controversial issue of testing methods for fuel efficiency and CO2 emissions. A consultancy report published by the European Commission in December concluded that carmakers are using flexibilities in the testing procedures to make their vehicles appear to emit less carbon dioxide than they do in real-world driving conditions.

The report says the tests are not mimicking real-world driving conditions, but rather creating conditions favourable to lower CO2 emissions. The techniques could account for as much as half of the recorded drop in average fleet CO2 emissions between 2002 and 2010, the report concluded. The Commission is considering requiring by 2017 a new testing cycle that is being developed.

In her proposal, Hall says the new test should be required as soon as it is available. But Ulmer’s proposal says current testing rules should be frozen and a new procedure should be introduced no earlier than 2020, so that the rules of the game are not changed for carmakers.

Ulmer’s proposal to freeze current testing procedures came under heavy criticism from other MEPs. “Why should we permit a testing cycle that is a scam?” asked Swedish Green MEP Carl Schlyter. “We’re fooling every car buyer in Europe.”

Karl-Heinz Florenz, a German Christian Democrat MEP, said: “There is hardly a greater lie in life than test cycles.” BEUC calculates that consumers are paying as much as €135 more per year than they might expect because the emissions tests do not reflect real driving conditions.